Today is the start of The Culture Capital Exchange’s (TCCE) 6th Inside Out Festival in association with Times Higher Education with a packed programme of over 50 events taking place in and around London over the coming week. We established the festival originally to showcase the enormous contribution that our Higher Education partners make and whilst that still remains a major aim, six years in any sector is a very long time and over time ideas evolve and move forward.
One of the major changes for TCCE over that time has been our partnership with Queen Mary University of London in conceptualising and subsequently leading the Knowledge Exchange Programme for Creativeworks London. As those of you who have worked with us over the last few years will know, Creativeworks London has in many ways been a really catalytic programme in terms of creating new relationships, new knowledge, new collaborations and perhaps more importantly of all new networks. It’s been fantastic that we have had the funding to support and fund some truly exciting and ground-breaking projects and ideas across our three main funding schemes since Autumn 2012. The outputs of those projects have been incredibly diverse and each have their own stories but what, of course, is more elusive to capture and quantify are the connections, the sheer networkedness, if I might call it that, that comes from such programmes.
It is a privilege and mostly a pleasure to be part of this, to see new relationships and projects evolve and to help nurture and shape them. It’s hard to describe our work at times; ‘brokering’ can sound terribly transactional, ‘engineering’ a bit too cold and ‘curating’ a bit too constraining. Sometimes I think we’re more like weavers, albeit weavers of conversations and ideas, because we are constantly in communication with people and it is through those conversations that things get made anew. This year lots of that new ‘stuff’ has, we are pleased to say, made its way into the Inside Out Festival. It’s heartening that this should be the case and it is of course this kind of evolution and shift that means that the festival is no longer just about ‘showcasing’ but it is becoming increasingly also a reflection of the fact that our networks of researchers, artists and people working in cultural and creative organisations continue to work together, to share their knowledge and ideas and to co-create new activity as a result.
On Tuesday 20th October, our ‘On Public Space Now’ salon sees us forging a new relationship with Design Exchange and contributors to the event include Lydia Fraser-Ward, one of our BOOST awardees and Cyril Shing, from Chelsea College of Art who has been hosting one of our Creative Entrepreneurs-in-Residence.
Also on Tuesday Peter Mitchell who was both a Researcher-in-Residence here at TCCE as well as with The Ragged School Museum, continued to work with the Geography Department at Queen Mary University of London and will be launching a new exhibit ‘Ragged Children, Mended Lives: Childhood and Philanthropy in late Victorian London’.
Wednesday 21st October sees the festival working once again with The Freud Museum but this time as a result of Benjamin Poore being Researcher-in Residence there earlier this year. Our ‘Freud and His Legacy’ debate brings together what should be a great panel of researchers as well as those from the arts.
Nadege Meriau, a Creative Entrepreneur-in-Residence, is part of our Philosophy and Contemporary Art Salon, also that day another of our Creative Entrepreneurs, Kate Ryder will be part of the festival with her Superpiano: The Piano ‘Inside Out’ performance.
Then finally on Friday 23rd, we are delighted that Robert Knifton who was a Researcher-in-Residence with Helen Storey Foundation has curated a fantastic looking day event entitled ‘Climate Change: Designing for a New Reality’.
I hope to see some of our ever extending Creativeworks London network out and about and indeed those of you who are simply interested in finding out more about what happens when research partners with the arts and creative industries. The results bear testament to the energy, creativity and knowledge creation that takes place when worlds come together.
Inside Out Festival 2015 runs from Monday 19th to Saturday 24th October.
Image Courtesy of Carl Turner Architects
